Reviews of A New Kind Of Wilderness, The Marching Band, Good One and Magic Farm by MARIA DUARTE, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MICHAL BONCZA
Latest editorial
Torchbearer for Puerto Rican liberation
SCOTT ALSWORTH foresees the coming of the smaller, leaner, and class conscious indie studio, with art as its guiding star
MARJORIE MAYO recommends an accessible and unsettling novel that uses a true incident of death in the Channel to raise questions of wider moral responsibility
MIK SABIERS wallows in a night of political punk and funk that fires both barrels at Trump
Reasonable radicalism, death in Abu Dhabi, locked-room romance, and sleuthing in the Blitz
SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
The Tertiary (Lo Terciario)
by Raquel Salas Rivera
(Timeless, Infinite Light, £12.99)
THE PROMESA (promise) — Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act of 2016 — is a US federal law and The Tertiary is a poetic response to it, seeking answers to the endemic political corruption and widespread poverty stemming from US neocolonialism.
“I remember that first time I read marx,/i wanted to be marx,” writes its author Raquel Salas Rivera, a queer poet who offers a decolonising critique and a reconsideration of Marx. He dissects Puerto Rico’s neocolonial present in thrilling language that is luminous, potent and rich.
The Latinx poet, who lives and teaches in New York where he emigrated from Puerto Rico, “picks” the titles for his poems from the popular 1976 translation of Marx’s Capital by Pedro Sacron. But Rivera employs an improvisatory “third-degree proximity” when ideologically fleshing out his poems.
More from this author
A novel by Argentinian Jorge Consiglio, a personal dictionary by Uruguayan Ida Vitale, and poetry by Mexican Homero Aridjis
Travelogue/reportage by Argentinean Maria Sonia Cristoff, and poetry by Peruvian Gaston Fernandez and Puerto Rican Cristina Perez Diaz
A pamphlet by British Latinx poet Patrick Romero McCafferty, poetry by Anglo-Argentinian Miguel Cullen, and a book of conjuring poems by Mexican Pedro Serrano
LEO BOIX selects the best books of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction written by Latinx and Latin American authors published this year
